19 April 2014

Tomorrow is Easter and the world is celebrating new and resurrected life.  We have wild flowers, aka blooming weeds, decorating our living room.  They are yellow, so full of color, so vibrant – just like life itself.  Alleluia.

The week has been slow and nice after closing school one week ago.  Filing of class notes, organizing handouts, a morning of accessioning books in the library, thinking about lesson plans for the rest of the term:  these were the school tasks which I faced and did, slowly and leisurely.  Then one morning was spent at the dentist for annual check-up and teeth cleaning.  Since I was in the U.S. last year and so hadn’t seen this dentist for a couple of years, he acted really pleased to see me again.  “Oh, you’re still here.  How wonderful!”  I’m not sure if he meant “here” in Tanzania or “here” on this earth, but both places are fine with me.

For the Holy Thursday services we went to celebrate with the orphans at the Village of Hope.  The service was much too long but I stayed awake by interacting with a little girl, about a three year old I’d say, who danced to her heart’s content whenever there was some music.  Especially at the “Glory to God” when the bells rang and the drums sang out, did she get out into the aisle and enjoy herself.  She was a little darling, and I pray for her future, infected as she is with HIV.

And then on Good Friday morning we went to visit some other children, this time at a facility for children who are mentally challenged.  It is run by a group of five Sisters and supported by the Diocese of Dodoma, Cheshire Foundation (from Great Britain) as well as local donations including some help from the Tanzanian government.  There are 40 children who live there, and those with less severe disabilities go to classes with their special education teachers.  They have some projects to help them with running expenses:  cows, pigs, chickens, a garden, a plot of grapes.  The children are precious, and followed us around wherever we went, holding our hands and arms.  Children love my arms because they are soft and fat, and they’ve never received such massaging as they did yesterday!  We took them some boxes of fruit juice as an Easter gift and hope that we can find some other things to take to them in the days ahead.  I admire so much those people who care for the children.  All the children  looked so neat and clean, and their overly exuberant behavior was lovingly accepted by their caretakers.  The Sister who took us around said that she had just received a phone call that the Prime Minister of Tanzania was on his way with some Easter gifts.  I hope they were many and useful for these beautiful children.

HAPPY EASTER!

7 April 2014

Today is Karume Day and a day off from school since it’s a public holiday.  Abeid Amani Karume was the first president of Zanzibar after a revolution (in 1964) which deposed the last Sultan of Zanzibar.  Later that year Zanzibar and Tanganyika united as Tanzania and Karume became the first Vice President of the United Republic of Tanzania with Julius Nyerere as president.  Karume was assassinated on April 7^th 1972, and I remember that quite clearly.  History seems to have happened very recently in a relatively young country like Tanzania.

The two past weeks have been rainy, with lovely rains falling almost every day except for the last few.  The air has a feel that seems the rain might be about over, but certainly the blessing that fell during these weeks have saved a lot of crops.  Some of the maize was really too far gone, but other fields were young enough to benefit from this rain.  I’ve heard that many parts of the country predict a good harvest; here it’s dicey, but some will reap and others not so.  That’s the life of a farmer.

We are getting ready to close school for mid-term break next week and so have been administering the exams that precede every break like this.  I still have a few of the 87 English papers to mark but the pile is getting smaller every hour.  Good results from good students.

And our city, Dodoma, the capital city of Tanzania, has its first traffic lights installed!  I don’t know if there are more than two intersections, but those two are the only ones that I’ve seen so far.  It’s all very orderly with drivers being patient as they wait out a red light.  Now if only there was a light at the end of our road that leads to the main Dodoma-Dar es Salaam highway.  One has to look right and left several times, trying to see past staff buses which have parked obstructing a line of vision to the right, small commuter buses dashing both right and left, bicycles, pedestrians trying to cross the road, and motorcycles by the hundreds.  Last week when I came home from town I decided to count the number of motorcycles on the road.  From downtown Dodoma where I started counting to home (distance of about six kms.)  I counted 69 motorcycles on the road.  They are menaces, and we  are told that many young men have been killed or incapacitated because of motorcycle accidents.  They take too many risks, for sure.